The Official v1.1 Extreme Hype Thread!

To start off this thread, I'll list some features not really fleshed out or talked of in the current Linden notes about 1.1.

Regular flying has a springy, loose camera effect that's pretty neat, and the springiness is customizable from the preferences menu.
You can now change all chat colors to be what you want. RAM size on video cards is now supported up to 256!
New sit gesture, you're cross legged! On top of that, the yoga float floats longer, and there's an animation for getting off of sitting on objects.
The land, oh my god the LAND is just BEAUTIFUL, and the clouds are much thicker (but there isnt' really anything special about it yet). Land differentiation between what is/isn't owned and what's yours is brightly colored red/green and this applies to property lines that you get by hitting "p". The options on what you can do with the land are pretty much EVERYTHING we've wanted, even some of it is in our pie menu!
There are about 10 plus different bump maps you can access and place on objects. And 3 "light, medium, opaque" transparency options for the environment mapping. You can mix these two things along with any texture/color-tint you want on your objects, AND the bump mapping works with animations!
Can't really say anything about the lag except that the sim really never slowed down due to large groups of people. (which is obviously a good thing).
The MAP is just beautiful now. It doesn't have an extention under it anymore, it can be made much smaller than usual, and you simply click on it to get a HUGE zoomable map with a TON of information on it. You can actually see where everyone is! Click on a sim and you can teleport to the center of that sim for free! (May change because I didn't see telehubs in any sims so I couldn't really test them. I think you have the ability to TP to any sim FROM anywhere, but you end up in the center of the sim on top of a telehub). You can go into people's profiles to pay them money and invite them to go directly where you are (very nice). OH DAMN I forgot to test landmarks to see if you could directly TP to them... so if someone tested that please let us all know if it worked or not.
Finally, permissions are on EVERYTHING so no more worries about stolen things!
I'm trying to stick to stuff that hasn't realy been talked about much and I think that there is much more left, but man........ jaw dropping experience for sure. SL is DEFINITELY going places now baby! MAJOR KUDOS to the Linden Lab team!

Man, I never saw half the new animations and stuff. Of course I spent all my time with my screen covered by a scripting window.

The new particle system abilities should be really slick down the line, although I couldn't get it to use a custom texture for the particles. Kept kicking me out of the sim

The damping effects on object properties are actually pretty cool -- I agree that a teleporting setPos would be nice to keep around for some stuff, but it was pretty slick to see objects ballooning up and zipping around as people edited them.

Although I didn't test 'em there's a full compliment of permissions for scripts, including permissions for the "next owner"

The new land tools were also pretty slick, with the ability to charge for access to land and sell a timed access pass. Although I got ripped off with that 0.01 day pass to Ama Omega's land for $99.

Another new addition I really liked was the improved Ctrl-F find window. Among other things, you can get today's events with landmarks right there in the window, and the basic search capabilities were greatly expanded as well from what I saw.

Bugwise it was hard to tell how close we are to 1.1 -- mainly because of the horrific database problems. Most people either didn't have a name or had a corrupted string of @####$%@#F{ or something. Which made identifying people and telling who was talking in chat quite the hassle. Not to mention the very attractive "TEXTURE NOT FOUND" pants a lot of people were wearing.

One last plea: llWriteNotecardLine and our promised magical inter-object communication

The new features were super-keen though, I'm looking forward to 1.1.

The terrain is gourgous! Better than I imagined! I love the clouds, but I still say a weather system would be nice (at first I thought there was but I was wrong ) But the rest of the terrain is truly better than I've seen in any other MMOG. The shininess is awesome! And the water looks great too! Bump maps are really cool! And the "no give" feature for objects is awesome (thanks!) the about land feature is cool, and the new profiles are AWEOSOME-O-RONIE.

Those are my rambles, thanks LL!

(moved from "1.1 beta yes!" thread)

The land was VERY smooth. "No more jaggies" is right. I have a GeForce 2 GTS and SL 1.0 draws all the land textures in low-res. In 1.1 I got to see high-res ground textures for the first time, and they look fantastic. I didn't notice any appreciable drop in FPS either! (I understand land in 1.0 is low-res because the GF2s don't have enough texture units or something. I am glad it's high-res in 1.1.)

Envmap and bumpmap features on textures are really cool and should add a HUGE degree of realism to the game if applied correctly. Bump maps for everything from bricks to checkerboards were in the test. I was hoping the envmap would be a true mirror, but it's just the active skybox texture. It has three levels of "shininess." At the lowest level, you get a polished look. Max it out and the skybox becomes your object's texture AND color.

Flying was pretty different from the camera perspective. The camera sort of bobs around as it follows you, seeming to have an inertia of its own rather than being at a fixed position relative to the avatar. (I wanted to turn that behavior off.) I also noticed turning in flight at high speed works FAR better than in 1.0. However, there were a couple oddities I noticed. At high speeds, the doppler effect on attachment sounds is wierd. Sounds were pitch-bended up in frequency at an uneven rate, resulting in a sort of bubbly, drunken, helium-huffing sort of effect. Also, I could literally see each impulse being added by my jetpack versus 1.0's total smoothness. Volume control on llPlaySound() is broken, but not on llLoopSound().

I have a hovertext altimeter, and in 1.0 at high speeds the hovertext would lag behind the avatar. Now it is always fixed perfectly in place. I also didn't see any high-velocity attachment flicker at all.

Recording movies with the MPEG-4 codec is much less performance-killing. I was able to snag a bunch of footage at 640x480 without giving up too much framerate. The playback rate still isn't accurate: recorded movies play back at "silent film" speed. And of course audio is not encoded with the movies, which is sort of a drag. (It's possible to fire up Audacity or any other wave editor in the background and have it record, if desired, but it would be nice if SL could make a .WAV dump that could be imported in a video editor.) All in all I got over 100MB of pretty decent MPEG-4 footage.

I found that I could rez some objects from my inventory, but not others. Those that did rez came up with a few prims missing. One time the prims showed up after some minutes, the rest of the times they didn't.

Someone was able to set the shininess and envmap for my attachment. They basically turned it into a huge mirror of the skybox. I was able to edit someone else's object and play their sounds, but not open their scripts. (That was the first thing I checked after I discovered other users could "open" my attachment.)

There was some script lag during sim crossings but not much. Not too many people were logged on, I'd guess that's why. It's about as laggy as flying around from sim to sim late at night on the production grid.

Didn't see any new avatar appearance features. I was also wondering if groups would have multiple membership levels but it seems they do not. There are TONS of new features for groups, though: voting for promotions and recalls, 50%/two-thirds/unanimous, etc.

Full allow/deny access lists as well as charge-per-hour passes to land are pretty cool.

Particle systems were really cool to watch. Lots of different kinds, looks like the particles are system-supplied rather than the usual llMakeXYZ() effects where the user has to supply the sprite. (The particles themselves looked really neat, a polychromatic blend.) I saw fountains that seemed to blow with the wind, liquid nitrogen-like geysers where the particles would skitter across the land or water (either away from or towards the task), etc. The max number of particles is now an option in the preferences, so people won't necessarily spiral if someone decides to set off a particle bomb. I tried to mess with llTakeCamera() but it didn't seem to do anything or generate any notices.

I predict that when SL 1.1 comes out, there will be a lot of really flashy envmapped and bumpmapped objects and attachments everywhere and probably a slew of particle effects. After a while I'm guessing things will cool down.

All in all I am grateful that Linden Lab is letting us in on these things, and I'm very glad that they continue to improve the "universe" itself rather than just adding mundane things like support for politics.

What about bulges!!??

Were there any bulges??

Oh also avatars banked which was awesome


One bug: I could modify other peoples profiles.

Oh and also about profiles: they show how many neg ratings you got too.. uber cool.

regarding the new male (ah-hem) slider... I asked a male av to look and then I also switched to male to check. It wasnt there.

It must be a highly techincal task, still in the works.

Us working folk miss just about everything...
Sounds awesome though... screenshots would be fun

I had about 10 mins to spare to check out 1.1 beta ver, not really but I did anyway, and I still can't travel in the light-traffic area ( >5000m ) without locking-up. = P

Looks good though, what little I saw.

I feel your pain.

Us GMT folk miss everything as well =)

Yeah screenshots etc would be great for us who could not get there....

on a side note has anyone built a SL fan website ?

Nothing seems to come up for me on Google.

I'd love to see : more input from users

Screenshots
Tutorials - Building, scripting, texturing
announcements
and more...

Has anyone built this ?

I am the only one who experienced terrible lag in the 1.1 preview?

Maybe it was because of my crappy MX video card? Bump mapping and shininess were almost nonexistent because of my card.

Land: Very smooth, very good looking.

New map system: Great, especially the marking of popular places.

Finder: Seemed pretty cool, but didn't play with it much. Saw an option in the land properties where you could have your land listed in the "Places" finder for 500$/week.

Bump maps: Nice, except they flicker alot when you zoom out. The choice is already pretty good.

Shiny textures: Mhh, looked crappy on my card (Geforce 3 Ti 500). It's probably a true pain to do this with a real environment map (mirror effect). Maybe if a few higher end cards support this in hardware? I remember this looked pretty cool in Unreal/Unreal Tournament in the time of my Voodoo 5 card. That was static data though.

New permission system: Didn't play with it much, seemed nice. It probably is not easy to understand for new users though. Also I noticed that some of the textures I had in my Inventory (originally from other people) I could not rename anymore. Others that I had originally uploaded myself I still could rename.

Land permissions: You could set it to group access only, have a 50 people long allow/deny list or even sell timed access for cash (all adjustable). When somebody denied you access to his land, you'd get a warning "You have 15 seconds to leave" and then it'd eject you.

Automatic abuse reports: This is my one point of critic. When somebody bumped you, you get a dialog box saying "Potential Abuse report" (or something) "Dave Zeeman bumped into you, do you want to report this?". Or "Christopher Omega hit you with a scripted Object, do you want to report this?". Thats a bit like suggesting every type of accidentially stumbling into a person when landing or your scripted door hitting him in the head is an evil case of harrassment. Also the poor Liasons will probably get spammed with this type of automatic abuse report.

Scripts:
Nice additions! The few I noticed were:

1. Totally revamped Particle system. The stuff I saw in world was AMAZING. Particles emitting from somebodies head, being attracted by the heads of the surrounding people and flowing in between. The script function for it had a truckload of options.
   
2. llGetFreeMemory (reports back the free mem available to the script, 16k on an empty one)
   
3. llRequestAgentData has been improved, you can now get an Avatars birth date (date he joined SL), his current ratings (including negative ones) and some other stuff I forgot.
   
4. SetPos/SetRot is now damped. It's still a bit choppy, but that might've been due to sim lag. It does look tons better than the warping around in 1.0. The door I tried looked like a door instead of a piece of wood with a warpdrive :)
   
5. llGetSimName. Yay!
   

Same here Jake -- I had nasty lag, and I have a GeForce 4 MX 420. But then, I've been having problems since the last 2 updates with packet lag rocketing up and down unpredictably.

Like the permissions, very sweet. But what does the "Transfer" mean? Handing it off free?

I agree with the other user who didn't like the way the new AVs looked -- mine looked smoother, but distinctly different. :/ If this stays, I foresee a lot of people spending some time tweaking their AVs to get them back to where they were.

AV motion was a lot smoother, and had some very nice touches. Less of the problem where your AV's feet get tangled up if you're standing somewhere not dead level, at least, for me.

I liked the improvements to the camera motion, and I also liked that your AV now banks much better when flying.

That abuse report that pops up everytime an AV bumps you has got to go!

The land edit section allows you to package odd sizes together also.

I agree. I appreciate what they are trying to do. If someone is shooting ot otherwise attacking you in a way you cant ID them it IS helpful. An abuse report popup WILL be abused though... its too easy. It BEGS to be abused. How about *just* the info.. in the chat line.. in a different color? That way its there if you need to file a report. You can just include chat history to include the info.

just a thought

Without reading through this entire thread, let me just pop in and say that Bump Mapping makes mea VERY happy SL camper

-Bone

Is that what that was? I thought Dave Zeeman was just tweaked because I, er, some unknown avatar with no name underneath (yeah, that's it...), set a ravenous horde of physics-enabled torii upon him...

Sorry, Dave... What can I say, they were hungry...

Past that, I only got to play for a half hour, but I made a few observations:

The Arch Builder script rezzed all the pieces in the same place - and wouldn't delete them as normal - which made it kinda tough to pick up the several dozen individual pieces.

Land Tools have a nice add - yay COLOR helps you SEE your SELECTIONS!, though I did not play with any terraforming. Loved the options for joining adjacent sections on a purchase - this is a great plus. Does it work when you're not actively purchasing a plot (ie - can you do it with two pieces you already own? Multiple pieces?)

Liked most of what I saw of the new group options, though voting on items that occurred while you were offline still left me puzzled on what the actual outcome was... definitely a large "huh?" effect here.

Lag was noticeable with a 64mb GeForce 4200ti and 768mb RAM over a 1mb cable modem connection.

Avatars many times had a blank "Name" box underneath - trying to recognize Avs by costume only can be a challenge... Is this a feature or a bug? (Some cool event ideas if you can somehow voluntarily mask your Av name, thought of course this would be ripe for abuse... maybe this could be a land option, along the lines of "Safe" land)

A fair amount of "object not in the database" error messages.
Couldn't rez a couple of my scripted weapons because of this.

Still not as pretty as There...
<slap, slap, BAD Sinclair!>
OK, I'm better now. Lost my mind, just for a moment.

Fun look - let's do it again soon! Shake out some more bugs...

=SV

I am SO glad someone had the sense to look into all of these things; I was so taken with the whole smoothness and really incredible detail of everything that I got a little sidetracked in my testing. 1.1 may still need a little tweaking here and there to satisfy the Lindens, but it looked pretty good to me. Aside from the pop up abuse window, that is, lol.

Nergal,

Thank goodness someone else is experiencing this. I too have an MX420, and I just assumed something was wrong with my connection (it's been acting very strangely, as of late). Whew... I feel better... but still... this should probably be brought to someone's attention...

A lot of people have the MX420, I think. If the v1.1 release means that SL's performance will become dramatically worse with that card, I fear that its popularity will suffer.

I have an MX480, and I really don't know the difference between the two chips, except that 1.1 was mucho smootho for me.

I've got the mx 440 - which is also VERY common in SL - 1.1 was definitely not lagged for me and I was in for a good while.